J. 8. Lee—An Outline of Chinese Geology. 263 
3. The central area comprises the provinces of Shan-si, Shen-si, 
and a part of Kan-su, and constitutes a huge barrier which 
arrests or deflects the waves of folds coming from the north-east and 
the north-west. The eastern part of the central block, namely, the 
province of Shan-si, with gently inclined Paleozoic and Triassic (7) 
strata, is divided up by mighty faults running more or less in 
parallelism with the Fen-ho valley. Towards the south-western 
corner of the province of Shan-si, where the Hwang-ho suddenly 
sweeps round froma north-south course to east-north-east, the faults 
look as if being progressively compressed till a single line of fracture, 
the Wei-ho fault, takes their place. The latter extends for a con- 
siderable distance along the northern foot of the Tsing-ling Range. 
Tectonically related to but physiographically separated from the 
‘table-land of Shan-si’’ is the province of Shan-tung, which Suess 
justly discusses as a “shattered horst”’. . 
In Southern China, or the area to the south of the Tsing-ling 
Range, large tectonic units are not so readily recognizable as in the 
northern part of the country. Nevertheless, we can make use of 
certain prevailing structural features so as te render an equally 
broad analysis possible. 
1. Let us begin with the mountainous region of western Su- 
chuan. There highly compressed parallel folds run predominantly 
from the north to the south. On reaching northern Yun-nan the 
folds tend to open out, that is to say, they appear to bend slightly 
round the Tibetan Plateau on the one side and follow the elbow of 
the Yang-tze on the other. 
2. Immediately to the east of the north-south folds of western 
Su-chuan and to the south of the Tsing-ling Range, a plain known as 
the Great Red Basin of Su-chuan spreadsitself out over a considerable 
area. The basin is filled up by a formidable sequence of Mesozoic 
and post-Mesozoic strata folded, in its south-eastern part, into 
a series of sharp anticlines with their trend varying from north-east 
to north-north-east. 
3. South-Eastern China, or the area to the east of the Yang-tze 
Gorges and the Kwei-chou Plateau, appears to descend from the 
highland of South-Western China by a gigantic step either in the form 
of a flexure or fractures, or probably both. If the line indicating the’ 
‘‘Hoa-kiang Flexure”’ (extending from about long. 106° 40’ E., 
lat. 25° N. to the north-east) of Leclére 1 be produced to the north- 
east, it would significantly pass along the eastern edge of the Kwei- 
chou Plateau, where signs of a powerful dislocation have been 
witnessed by Wingate,? and would fall in line with the axis of the 
Hwang-ling Anticline in western Hu-peh or the gorge district of the 
Yang-tze. It is interesting to compare this line of disturbance with 
the eastern edge of the Shan-si Plateau and the Great Khingan 
1 Leclére, op. cit., pl. xiii. 
2 Geogr. Journ., 1899, p. 639 et seq. 
